Saturday, January 27, 2018

The late country singer Waylon Jennings once wrote and recorded
a song with the splendid title Don’t You
Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand.

It was a wry comment on the consequences of being identified
as a key figure in country music’s outlaw movement, so named because it
rebelled against the white-bread conservatism of the country music mainstream.

A magazine article about Jennings had referred to his cocaine
use, which resulted in federal drug agents raiding the studio where he was
recording. That was the genesis of the song, which included the lines: “Someone
called us outlaws in some old magazine/And New York sent a posse down like I
ain’t never seen.”

It wasn’t exactly Jennings’ most memorable song, but its title sprang
into my head a few days ago while I was reading the latest frenzied
denunciations of Donald Trump.

I loathe Trump, as does virtually everyone I know. But things
have got to the point where it’s fair to ask: Don’t you think this Donald Trump
bit’s done got out of hand?

The unceasing barrage of anti-Trump vitriol in the media has
reached fever pitch, but you have to wonder what it’s achieving. The polls show
virtually no decline in the number of American voters who approve of him, while
the number who strongly approve of
him remains steady at 28-30 per cent.

Meanwhile, inconveniently for Trump despisers like me, economists
are talking about the “Trump bump”. The American economy is humming along
merrily and there has been a rise in consumer confidence.

Some anti-Trump comment is right on the nail. An example was
Tom Scott’s cartoon three days ago which had Trump saying: “Fake news says that
I am a narcissist, which I am not. But if I was, I would be the best narcissist
ever, period, no question!”

It perfectly encapsulated the US president’s combination of
vanity and oafishness and might even have coaxed a grudging smile from Trump
fans.

But mostly the condemnation directed at Trump is preaching
to the converted. After all, the people who are appalled by him made up their
minds long before he got to the White House. Constantly disparaging and ridiculing him may reinforce
their sense of moral certitude, but there’s no evidence that it will change anything.

In fact it may be counter-productive, because those who
support Trump look at the outpouring of loathing in the media and take it as
proof that he’s the victim of a conspiracy by elitist journalists who are
overwhelmingly biased against him and interested only in publishing material that
reflects badly on him.

Some American journalists are wise enough to see this. On
America’s National Public Radio last week I heard Michael Woolf say that the US
press was behaving hysterically and making a fool of itself. “As we go after
his [Trump’s] credibility, our credibility equally becomes a problem,” he said.

Woolf is no cheerleader for Trump. He’s the author of the recent
best-seller Fire and Fury, an exposé
of the president’s bizarre behaviour in the White House.

It was also on National Public Radio (which, incidentally, wrings
it hands in anguish over Trump 24/7) that I heard an even more damning
condemnation of the US media from another journalist, Glenn Greenwald.

This might seem surprising, since Greenwald is a hero of the
Left. He collaborated with National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward
Snowden and came to New Zealand for Kim Dotcom’s much-vaunted “Moment of Truth”
event, which was supposed to turn the tide against John Key’s government
immediately before the 2014 election.

I can’t imagine Greenwald is a fan of Trump any more than
Woolf is. But to his credit he exposed the fact that several major American
media outlets, including CNN and CBS, published a false story implicating the
Trump camp in a Russian hacking operation.

The media outlets portrayed the story as a smoking gun and
claimed it had been verified by multiple sources. But a crucial date proved to
be wrong, which completely nullified their account – and when it became obvious
they had got it wrong, they tried to wriggle out by broadcasting a grudging,
half-hearted correction.

According to Greenwald, it was the latest in a series of
serious mistakes made by journalists reporting Trump’s suspected links with
Russia. He says the US media are in such a frenzy to “get the goods”
on Trump that they are willing to violate the principles of good journalism,
thereby confirming public suspicions that they cannot be trusted and inviting
Trump’s taunts about “fake news”.

If Waylon Jennings were still around, it would make a great
song. I’ve got just the title for it.FOOTNOTE: An
anonymous commenter took a whack at me on Stuff yesterday for making the
supposedly “obligatory declaration for media types” of disclosing my loathing
for Trump. Well, I do loathe Trump. Would this person have preferred that I was
dishonest about admitting it? Didn’t the rest of my column serve as a
warning that “media types” – that includes me – risk having their journalistic
judgment distorted by their aversion to him? And didn't I acknowledge that the US economy was thriving, as this commenter was anxious to point out? Sigh. You just can’t win.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

It’s natural that journalists are attracted to Jacinda
Ardern. For a start, she’s of the same generation as most people working at the
front line of the media, and the same sex as a large proportion of them. It’s
fair to say that her political views probably mirror those of many, if not
most, journalists too. To put it simply, she’s like them.

Besides, journalism thrives on newness and novelty, and
Ardern represents what many journalists see as an exhilarating and overdue
generational change in the Beehive. For nine years we were governed by
middle-aged men in suits – men who, moreover, were nominally on the
conservative side of politics, even if their policies didn’t always reflect
that. Ardern is still in her 30s. She’s fresh, spontaneous, personable,
accessible and seems effortlessly in control of things. To use a silly popular
expression, what’s not to like?

Call it the Trudeau effect. Admittedly Pierre Trudeau was a
lot older, at 48, when he became prime minister of Canada in 1968, but the
media reaction was similar. The press were mesmerised by the charismatic,
left-leaning lawyer – a phenomenon replicated more recently by his
youthful-looking son Justin.

It happened under John F Kennedy too, and anyone who was in
Australia in the 1960s and 70s will remember South Australian premier Don
Dunstan having a similar effect. Dunstan was another suave lawyer and
intellectual whose relative youth and liberal views set him apart from the
crusty old reactionaries – such as Queensland’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen and
Victoria’s Sir Henry Bolte – who then dominated Australian politics. The
Australian media loved him.

There’s an obvious professional hazard here, because it’s
hard to write critically about someone you like. Journalists should be aware of
this trap – women journalists especially, since they are more likely than men to
identify with Ardern. They should recognise their affinity with her and offset
it by making an extra effort to be hard-headed in the way they
report her, but there’s not much evidence of that happening. You have to search
hard in the mainstream media for any comment pieces that are critical of
Ardern, or that even ask awkward questions about her leadership. I believe most
of the journalists covering her want her to succeed and, consciously or
otherwise, shy away from writing anything that might shatter her golden halo.
But democracy depends on politicians being held accountable – and for that, we
need journalists to be professionally sceptical, regardless of how they might
feel personally.

The golden halo effect has been obvious – you might say almost
nauseatingly so – in the way the media covered the announcement of Ardern’s
pregnancy. The political scientist Bryce
Edwards compiles a very useful daily compendium of virtually everything written
about New Zealand politics in the mainstream media and the better-known blogs. Monday’s summary contained nearly 100 news stories and comment pieces on the Jacinda
Ardern-Clarke Gayford baby, many of them written in fawning tones more
appropriate to the women’s magazines. Even a few veteran, hard-nosed hacks in
the Press Gallery seemed to have been reduced to jelly by an attack of Woman’s Weekly-style baby fever.

The coverage rarely failed to rise above facile, superficial
slogans and feel-good clichés. Amid all the
gushing, a few commentators seized the opportunity to push ideological barrows or score points in the gender war. But almost without exception, it was cheerleader journalism. Conspicuously
absent was any cool, detached analysis of the announcement, its timing or its
political implications. No one wanted to break ranks and suggest that Ardern
giving birth while running the country might be anything but a resounding triumph
for New Zealand womanhood.

Bizarrely, you had to turn to the sport section in Stuff today to read a clear-eyed piece –
by columnist Mark Reason – asking some of the questions that need to be asked.
Reason used tennis star Serena Williams’ struggles with the demands of motherhood
as the basis for a thoughtful and courageous analysis of the reasons why we
shouldn’t necessarily be ecstatic about Ardern’s pregnancy. His reasoning (pun
not intended) was probably summed up when he wrote: “Being a mother is one of
the greatest and most demanding jobs a human being will ever do. So is being a
prime minister. Do we seriously expect anyone to fully function in both at the
same time?” It’s a question no political commentators dared ask because we’re
told that girls can do anything. But not all can, as the experiences of some
first-time mothers show.

Reason’s piece is important because he’s a dissenting voice
at the back of the room breaking through the excited chatter and saying, “Okay,
but hang on a minute”. An informed democracy needs such voices. It makes me very
uneasy when media opinion runs so overwhelmingly one way that people become
frightened to express a contrary view.

Before I finish, one more point about the prime minister’s
pregnancy. Ardern believes in a woman’s right to have an abortion and it’s a
fair bet that most, if not all, the people applauding the news of her pregnancy
do too. I imagine most would support moves to liberalise the abortion laws,
which are likely under this government.

What mystifies me is that the same people can be enraptured
about the impending birth of a baby in one set of circumstances, yet believe
that in a different situation, it can be disposed of without qualms. Pro-choice
activists will say the crucial difference is whether the mother wants the baby
or not, and Ardern clearly does. But how can a baby be regarded as a source of
immense joy in one situation and as an inconvenient lump of tissue to be got
rid of – flushed down the toilet, in effect – in another? After all, the intrinsic worth of the baby
doesn’t change from one situation to the other; it’s still the same human being
in the making. Can someone please explain?

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, January 24.)

First things first. Prime
minister Jacinda Ardern and her partner Clarke Gayford are entitled to our
congratulations and goodwill following the announcement that they are expecting
a baby.

There are few experiences
more joyous or life-changing than becoming a parent, and anyone with a modicum
of human empathy will want them to be blessed with a healthy baby who will grow
up loved and happy.

But amid the wave of euphoria
that swept the news media following the announcement, one or two inconvenient
questions appear to have been overlooked.

There is enormous pressure,
even on Ardern’s political opponents, to unreservedly welcome the impending
birth. Anyone not caught up in the general mood of feel-goodism risks being
pilloried as a sexist, a reactionary and a killjoy.

Make no mistake: This is an
ideological minefield, and the Left-leaning commentariat lost no time firing
warning shots across the bows of anyone who might dare to question the
circumstances of the pregnancy or its political implications.

After all, everyone knows
what happened to AM Show co- host
Mark Richardson when he asked Ardern, following her elevation to the Labour
leadership last August, whether she had motherhood aspirations.

Richardson has a reputation
as a jock and a bit of a loudmouth (that’s his role), but it was a fair and
arguably obvious question to ask on behalf of viewers, many of whom might have
been wondering about the same thing.

Indeed, Ardern acknowledged
that Richardson was entitled to ask about it, since she had raised the issue
herself and effectively invited questions. In any case, shouldn’t all cards have
been on the table when someone was asking us to elect her as prime minister?

But the subject was deemed to
be off-limits because we’re told that motherhood intentions are no one’s
business but the woman’s, and certainly not the business of a prospective
employer. This applies even when the
prospective employer is the public of New Zealand and the woman in question is
running for the most important office in the land.

The message from that episode
was clear: anyone who asks personal questions, particularly relating to the prime
minister’s gender, can expect to be crucified. But in politics, the personal
and the political constantly overlap, since personal factors unavoidably
influence political positions.

It follows that only the most
sensitive and intrusive personal matters should be off-limits. Yet the
boundaries around what are deemed to be legitimate subjects of public discussion
are being drawn ever tighter.

So what awkward questions, if
any, have the media shied away from asking about Ardern’s pregnancy? They
relate mainly to disclosure and political practicalities.

Ardern has said she learned
of the pregnancy on October 13. At that stage Labour and National were still vying
for the favour of kingmaker Winston Peters.

The discovery that she was
pregnant must have presented Ardern with an acute moral dilemma. Should she
have said something?

Couples are understandably reluctant
to announce a pregnancy in the early stages because apart from anything else,
there’s a chance something might go amiss. Besides, Ardern at that stage might
not have been confident of forming a government.

Even so, there was a chance
that she would become prime minister, in which case she would have to take time
off – and this during her vital first few months in charge of an inexperienced
government that would still be feeling its way.

There is a valid argument
that Ardern should have disclosed then that she was pregnant. That would have
enabled the pregnancy to be factored into coalition negotiations, and later
into how the new government would be set up and who might deputise for her.

She had a choice between
disclosure and staying silent, and she chose silence. Some people, while
appreciating that she must have been in an awkward predicament, will think less
of her for that. Some say she misled by omission.

She then agreed to the
appointment of Peters as her deputy, knowing that a man whose party won only 7
percent of the vote would be acting prime minister while she takes six weeks
off – and possibly longer, given the unpredictability of childbirth and the
challenges of adjusting to the demands of a baby.

And if anything goes wrong,
or if Ardern struggles with the combined demands of motherhood and the prime
ministership (although we’re not supposed to consider that prospect), what
then? These are issues of public interest. We are entitled to discuss them
without being shushed.

I don’t have an opinion on
whether Ardern can do a good job as PM while simultaneously attending to the
needs of a new baby. Perhaps she can, although mothers I know say the demands
of a baby, particularly a first one, can be all-consuming and overwhelming.

We shall see. But if things
don’t work out, it could have consequences for the country. This puts Ardern’s
pregnancy in a different category from other expectant mothers whose personal
decisions are said to be none of our business.

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

This week marks a significant anniversary for me. Fifty
years ago on Monday, I began my career in journalism.

Looking back, it seems like it was a different century. Oh,
that’s right, it was.

Three of us started together in the reading room of the old Evening Post in Wellington. I’m the only one still in
journalism. The others dropped out decades ago.

The reading room was where everything printed in the paper –
classified ads and all – was checked prior to publication for typographical
errors, misspellings and other potential embarrassments.

I was a copyholder, the most menial job in journalism. It
was mind-numbingly tedious work, and poorly paid at $21 a week (unless you
worked extra hours on Saturdays for the Sports Post, in which case you earned
the giddy sum of $23), but it was the first step on the career ladder.

All three of us who started that day were male and straight
out of secondary school. There were women in journalism then, but they were
very much in the minority.

Frances Kitching, now known as Dame Fran Wilde, was one of a
handful of young women in the general reporting room. She covered the
Magistrate’s Court, but most female recruits were assigned to the journalistic
ghetto known as the women’s pages.

Of course the gender balance has largely been reversed since
then – just one of the many changes in journalism since I reported for work in
the rabbit warren that was the Blundell Brothers' Evening
Post building (actually three buildings, linked by a maze of corridors and walkways) on January 22, 1968.

Another change is that no one now goes straight into
journalism from school and learns on the job. From the late 1960s onward, the
training of journalists was gradually taken over by tertiary education
institutes and universities.

I lament this. Admittedly the old system wasn’t perfect; training
was haphazard and we were largely left to learn from our mistakes. (As a green
cadet reporter, by then working for The Dominion, I remember a notoriously cantankerous sub-editor bellowing at me,
for all the newsroom to hear, that if I didn’t learn to spell “accommodation”
by the following day, he would stand me on the subs’ desk and kick my fucking
arse.) But overall, it worked.

And notwithstanding all the talk now about diversity in
newsrooms, the old off-the-street entry model attracted recruits with a wide
range of backgrounds and life experience. Many came from working-class or lower
middle-class homes. They had never been near a university and probably wouldn’t
have entered journalism had they been required to study for a year beforehand.

What’s more, the system, such as it was, allowed them to
develop their own individual and sometimes idiosyncratic styles – far more so
than today’s academic assembly line, which tends to produce bland, cookie-cutter
journalism, mostly devoid of wit or story-telling skill.

And here’s another concern about the academic takeover of
journalism training. There are still journalism tutors with solid newsroom
experience. Some of it was acquired so long ago that over time, they have morphed into
academics. But of far greater concern are those who come from an academic background,
and whose view of journalism is rooted in theory – sometimes overtly neo-Marxist
theory – rather than practice.

Many of the latter type inculcate their impressionable
students with the idea that the purpose of journalism is to change the world. It’s
not. The purpose of journalism is simply to tell people, as objectively and
even-handedly as possible, what’s happening in their world. What people choose
to do with that information is over to them.

That was the understanding implanted
in previous generations of journalists, and transgressors were quickly pulled
into line. Journalists who privately held strongly left-wing views, as many
did, were conscientious about not allowing personal opinions to influence their
work.

It all seems quaintly old-fashioned now. While many of today’s
journalism graduates go out into the working world with frighteningly skimpy
knowledge of history, geography, science and the English language (supposedly their
stock in trade), they are exquisitely schooled in matters of class, race, sexism
and inequality. One word they can all be relied on to spell correctly is “inappropriate”.

The politicisation of journalism training is just one of
several adverse trends to have influenced the profession in my lifetime. Another was the
takeover of our two biggest newspaper groups by Australian interests.

The Australians who acquired what were previously Wilson and
Horton (owners of the New Zealand Herald
group) and Independent Newspapers Ltd (publishers of The Dominion, The Evening
Post, The Press and others) didn’t
understand New Zealand, probably didn’t want to, and had little interest beyond making money. They had no emotional stake in the country and therefore
little incentive or commitment to protect the New Zealand newspaper industry
when the digital revolution kicked in and the going got tough.

Early evidence of their inability to understand this country,
and their disdain for our way of doing things, came with their dismantling of
the old New Zealand Press Association – an act of corporate vandalism that unravelled
decades of news sharing by papers around the country. Under the NZPA
arrangements, someone in in Tauranga or Invercargill could read about events of
significance in Nelson or New Plymouth. We know far less about ourselves as a
result of its demise.

I’m going to stick my neck out now and suggest that New
Zealand journalism has also been damaged by feminisation. I hasten to emphasise
that I’m not arguing, and would never argue, that women are not good for
journalism. I have been fortunate to work with innumerable talented and
sometimes formidable female journalists. I won’t name names because if I started,
I wouldn’t know where to stop.

What I’m referring to is the feminisation of newspaper
content. Pages once devoted to news of substance – so-called “hard news” and
journal-of-record stories about parliamentary debates, court cases, council
meetings and suchlike – are now filled with “soft”, lifestyle-oriented content:
food, fashion, health, interior design, personal finances, travel and entertainment. I can’t
imagine that the distinguished women journalists I’ve worked with would be any
happier about this trend than I am.

But of course the most damaging development of all has been
the devastation inflicted on the print media as a result of the digital revolution.
Tragically, newspaper owners have been complicit in this process. Panicked into
joining the online revolution, they diverted precious resources from print and
thus made inevitable the decline of their most valuable assets. In the process
they brutally shed many of their most talented and experienced people, plugging
the holes with younger, cheaper and (dare I say it) more compliant staff whose editorial judgment was often
suspect.

I have sometimes asked myself whether the people who
controlled the industry in the 20th century – distinguished New Zealand
newspapermen such as Mike Robson of INL and Michael Horton of Wilson and Horton – would have succumbed so
easily. I don’t believe they would have. Cautious and conservative they may have been, but
they had ink in their veins and would have regarded newspapers as worth
fighting for. It’s no coincidence that the paper which most successfully weathered
the ravages of the Internet era, the Otago
Daily Times, is one that remained in New Zealand hands and under the
control of an old-school proprietor.

To an old print hack like me, the devastation of the New
Zealand media over the past 10 years has been heartbreaking. I console myself with
the knowledge that I lived through what I now see as a golden age of New
Zealand journalism – an era when newspapers were not only prosperous and well-resourced,
but willing to challenge authority, to dig up stories that powerful people would
have preferred to remain safely buried, and when necessary to spend lots of
money defending their right and duty to do so. I don’t think there’s any doubt
that the 1980s and 90s were a high-water mark for gutsy, risk-taking journalism,
most of it done by newspapers.

For me, journalism has been a good career. I have met
interesting people, been to fascinating places and witnessed events that most
people don’t get to see. I have also worked with some unforgettably colourful
characters, the like of whom will probably never again be seen in newsrooms,
and made lifelong friends.

I didn’t get rich. No one in New Zealand ever became wealthy
from journalism, although for some people it served as a springboard into other
activities – notably public relations – that enabled them to buy flash cars and
big houses in fashionable suburbs.

Would I recommend a career in journalism now? Sadly, no.

Footnote: In a past
life I was editor and news editor of The Dominion and assistant editor of The
Evening Post. I have worked on daily and Sunday papers in Australia, spent
several years as a staff writer at the New Zealand Listener, and still cherish the
memory of four happy years as news editor at what was then the Nelson Evening
Mail (now simply the Nelson Mail). I have worked as a freelance journalist
since 2002 and know how to spell “accommodation”.

Monday, January 15, 2018

A recent Dominion Post
column of mine headlined “Dinosaur versus Dominatrix” (reproduced on this site),
about an on-air clash between Kim Hill and Don Brash, brought a couple of
old-school broadcasting grandees out of the woodwork.

Ian Johnstone, a familiar face on TV screens from the 1960s
till the 1990s, and Geoffrey Whitehead, a former BBC deputy political editor
who became CEO of Radio New Zealand and now lives in retirement in Napier, both
had a whack at me for criticising Hill’s hostile demolition job on Brash.

Both seemed to think that unleashing RNZ’s most aggressive
interviewer against Brash, for the sin of criticising Morning Report’s Guyon Espiner over his use of the Maori language,
was a perfectly legitimate thing for the state broadcaster to do.

I haven’t responded to either of my critics until now
because more important things – family and holidays – have occupied my
attention. But before I get on to Johnstone and Whitehead, there are a couple
of points to be made about the furore that arose from Brash’s Facebook post
about Espiner.

Was it a storm in a teacup, as the leftist comedian Jeremy
Elwood (“leftist” and “comedian” are virtually synonymous these days) disingenuously
wrote in a column? Yes, it was. But it was the Left that whipped up the storm,
and it did so for a reason. It seized on Brash’s objection to the use of te reo
on RNZ and turned it into a rallying point in the ongoing culture war between
“progressives” and conservatives.

That’s the wider context in which the debate played out, and
it explains the ferocity of the reaction against Brash. The aim was to make an
example of him: to inflict such bruising punishment that opponents of the Left’s
identity politics agenda would be fearful about the consequences of speaking
out in future.

Kim Hill’s overtly hostile “interview” [sic] with Brash was
part of this response, which brings me back to Johnstone and Whitehead. These
two men clearly regard themselves as lofty guardians of the public broadcasting
heritage and see it as their duty to correct those of us who, for reasons of ignorance,
malice or political misguidedness, don’t properly appreciate it.

Johnstone wrote a piece in the Dominion Post in which he defended Hill's confrontation with Brash as “lively,
challenging and entertaining”. It didn’t surprise me that he approved.
Johnstone is a genteel old Leftie – too genteel by far to have attempted a
Hill-style demolition job when he was still a broadcaster himself, but I’ve no
doubt he would have quietly applauded. Brash’s neoliberalism would be anathema
to him.

Johnstone adopted a patronising tone toward me, wagging a
finger at me for my “comical hyperbole”. Here was the seasoned broadcasting
veteran patiently explaining, for the benefit of the irksome johnny-come-lately
(hell, I’ve been in the media for only 50 years – what would I know?), that
what Hill did to Brash fell within the finest traditions of public
broadcasting.

Strangely, he wrote of me: “I guess what he’d really like to
say, but dare not, is that he thinks too many RNZ staff are ‘Left-leaning’.” I
can’t imagine why Johnstone would think I dare not say that, seeing I’ve been
saying it for years, but let me say it again, unequivocally. I not only think many RNZ staff are left-leaning; I
know they are, because I know many of
them personally and know their political views.

It’s virtually imprinted in the DNA of public broadcasting
organisations that they lean to the left. One of the reasons people seek work
with state broadcasting organisations is that they distrust capitalism and the
profit motive, and regard state-owned media as pure and untainted. And since
like attracts like, there evolves a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing monoculture.
That’s true of RNZ just as it is of the BBC, Australia’s ABC and National
Public Radio in the United States (all of which I listen to).

This becomes a problem only if RNZ employees allow their
political views to influence their work. Many of them don’t, and I respect them
for it, but others make no attempt to disguise their political leanings. (I
note that Finlay Macdonald, whose wife Carol Hirschfeld is RNZ’s head of content,
recently used the RNZ website a to write a piece gleefully rubbing the National
Party’s nose in the dirt over the
election outcome. It doesn’t say much for RNZ’s, Hirschfeld’s or Macdonald’s
ethics that this cosy nepotistic arrangement is permitted, but it certainly
says something about the political ethos of what is supposed to be a neutral
organisation.)

Back to Johnstone. He rebukes me for saying that RNZ no
longer regards its job as being to serve all New Zealanders, and he asks rhetorically
whether I hear its daily news reports from all over the country, as if these
contradict my argument. Well yes, I do, but they don’t prove a thing. RNZ
generally – generally – plays with a
straight bat when it comes to news reportage, and I’ve praised it in the past
for adhering to journalism values that have largely been abandoned by other
news organisations. The country would be much the poorer without RNZ’s news
bulletins. But news reports are just a small part of what RNZ does, and
Johnstone can’t expect to get away with the trick of cherry-picking his
evidence to suit his argument.

The political taint that permeates much of what RNZ does is
found elsewhere – in current affairs and magazine-style interviews and discussion programmes, in
the subjects and interviewees selected, in the slant of the questions asked and
the stance (either sympathetic or hostile) of the presenter, and in so-called
“debates” that are anything but, because only people with views that are deemed
acceptable (and who all conveniently agree with each other) are invited to take
part.

Even then the picture is far from uniform across all of RNZ,
because some of its programmes (Nine to
Noon, for instance, and Morning
Report, at least most of the time) are generally even-handed. I have huge regard for Nine to Noon host Kathryn Ryan.

I would never subject RNZ to blanket condemnation, because
it continues to do a lot of things very well and conscientiously. In a moment
of cultural sensitivity, I once labelled it a national taonga. But to those like
Johnstone who insist that RNZ caters for all New Zealanders, I can only ask why
so many people I know – intelligent, informed people with a keen interest in
politics, society and culture – have long since given up listening to it because they object to the relentless political and ideological spin. They
ask me why I still bother, and I reply that I listen to RNZ because it it’s my
right to listen to RNZ and to expect it to adhere to its charter. I’m a part-owner
of it, after all, and my taxes help pay the salaries of its employees. Call me
bloody-minded, call me naïve, but if more New Zealanders, rather than giving up
and switching to NewstalkZB or Radio Live, listened to RNZ and insisted that it
cater to a true cross-section of tastes and political views, as is their right,
perhaps it would feel obliged to lift its game.

As it is, RNZ will of course continue to be defended by people
like Johnstone and Whitehead. They have spent their lives in public
broadcasting and regard RNZ’s pervasive soft-Left bias and uncritical embrace of "progressive" causes as the natural order of
things.

One last point. In his letter, Whitehead pompously suggested I didn’t understand the role of the public broadcaster. In fact I not
only understand it perfectly well, but I believe in public broadcasting and
have said so many times. Where I differ with Johnstone and Whitehead is in my
interpretation of its role. It is not the function of the public broadcaster to
act as an agent of social and political change or to promote ideological views
that some of its presenters and producers think would benefit us all. In
fact I would say that ultimately, the greatest threat to public broadcasting
may come from those within who abuse its power and therefore undermine its standing
and credibility.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Publicly funded wowsers never rest in their attempts to whip
up moral panic over our supposed enslavement by alcohol. Even when statistics point
to declining liquor consumption, which you’d think would be welcomed, these doomsters
remain resolutely po-faced.

RNZ led its 7 o’clock news bulletin this morning with a report
that Australian teenagers are turning away from alcohol. Deakin University researchers
found that only 45 percent of teenagers in 2015 had drunk a full glass of
alcohol compared with 70 percent 15 years earlier.

Nicki Jackson, executive director of New Zealand's Alcohol Healthwatch, said
that was in line with what was happening here. Reason to be positive,
surely? Er, no. According to Jackson, we mustn’t be complacent.

“Yes, there’s been declines [sic] in young people choosing
to take up drinking but we’ve seen no declines whatsoever in the style in which
young people drink. They’re still drinking very heavily, so that culture hasn’t
changed.” Even good news is bad news, then.

Then comes Jackson’s alarmist crunchline: “hazardous binge-drinking”
has been getting worse (she cited no figures, and the official definition of “binge-drinking”
is dodgy anyway) and the government needs to raise the price of alcohol.

Nothing new here: it’s the same tired old refrain. In fact
the only surprising thing about this non-news item was that someone at RNZ
considered it important enough to lead the bulletin.

Alcohol Healthwatch would realise, of course, that Sunday
morning is a quiet time in newsrooms and would have timed its statement to take
advantage of that fact. Obviously, it could also count on the RNZ duty editor giving
the non-story prominence, because RNZ journalists – in fact journalists generally
– tend to be sympathetic toward sanctimonious pressure groups pushing moral
panic buttons.

There was evidence of that in another alcohol-related story on
Stuff three days ago. This one, sourced
from the taxpayer-funded Health Promotion Agency, cited research that purportedly
showed older New Zealanders were drinking to greater excess and more frequently
than adults in eight other countries.

According to the research, New Zealand had the
second-highest proportion of 50-plus drinkers after England. And what were the
other countries? The United States, South Africa, China, Mexico, Ghana, India
and Russia.

Of the nine countries with which we were compared, only two –
England and the US – could be described as culturally and socially similar to New
Zealand, and even the US is very different from us when it comes to social
habits.

It follows that no self-respecting researcher could draw any
useful conclusion from this “research”. It’s a nonsense. Far more meaningful (and
ideologically unbiased) are the per capita alcohol consumption figures compiled
by the OECD, which consistently show New Zealand to be roughly in the middle of
the table and behind comparable countries such as Britain and Australia.

This doesn’t deter academics such as Andy Towers from Massey
University, who was quoted in the Stuff
story, from extracting pessimistic conclusions from the available “research”.
Towers was quoted as saying New Zealanders aged 50-plus had “concerning”
drinking habits.

There was a time when journalists were trained to be
sceptical and to “doubt everything with gusto”, in the words of my late
colleague Frank Haden. Not so these days, when claims by moralistic academics
are accepted unquestioningly and meaningless surveys are cited in an attempt to
convince us, contrary to all our everyday observations and experience, that New
Zealand is awash in alcohol.

Almost without exception, political commentators declared
Jacinda Ardern their politician of 2017, and you could see why.

Thrust into the leadership of a floundering and demoralised
Labour Party six weeks out from a general election, she re-energised the party
and ran an assured, upbeat campaign that saw Labour bounce back from woeful
poll ratings to win 37 per cent of the vote and 14 new seats.

History will record that she failed on election day. The gap
between Labour and National remained too wide. Yet contrary to expectations,
probably including her own, Ardern ended up as prime minister.

For the first time since New Zealand adopted the MMP system
in 1993, the party that won the biggest share of the vote didn’t form the
government. How we arrived at this outcome was down to one man: Winston Raymond
Peters.

The Peters party, a.k.a. New Zealand First, won 7 per cent
of the vote. It lost three of its electorate seats in Parliament, including
Peters’ own. Despite this less than resounding endorsement by the people
of New Zealand, Peters ended up determining the makeup of the new government.

Many insist, bizarrely, that this is an example of MMP
working exactly as intended, but I would argue that it points to a gaping void
in our constitutional arrangements – one that allows a politician whose party
commanded an almost negligible share of the vote to decide who will govern us.

For his willingness to exploit this wonky
system to his advantage, and for the sheer audacity of the way he went about
it, Peters is a hands-down winner of my award for Politician of the Year in
2017.

The Great Tuatara of New Zealand politics brazenly played
the system to ensure he became not only deputy prime minister but Minister of Foreign
Affairs as well.

Foreign Affairs seemed an odd portfolio choice, given that
his political preoccupations have always been domestic. But it’s tailor-made for
him, involving maximum prestige in return for minimal effort. The ink was
barely dry on the coalition agreement before he was jetting to Vietnam to
hob-nob with world leaders at an Apec summit.

Peters played everyone for suckers in the post-election
coalition game. He was allowed to orchestrate the entire coalition-forming
process.

Just to make sure no one was in any doubt about who was in
charge, he announced the formation of the new government live on television
without even bothering to first inform the party leaders he had been
negotiating with.

In a proper rules-based democracy, this whole process would
surely have been controlled by the head of state – or in our case, her
representative, the Governor-General. But Dame Patsy Reddy was just another
impotent observer on the sidelines.

The coalition negotiations took place in an environment of
almost paranoid secrecy. We now know there’s a document covering what was
discussed and agreed but we’re not allowed to see it.

The political establishment insists this is the way it must
be done. Voters are not to be trusted with information about how decisions are
made on who will govern us.

But there are some things we do know. One is that National
and Labour believed they were negotiating with Peters in good faith. Both
thought they were in with a more or less equal chance of becoming the government.

We now know, of course, that on the day before the election,
Peters had quietly commenced legal proceedings against four National cabinet
ministers, including then prime minister Bill English. This made it extremely improbable that he would seal a deal with
National, but it wasn’t divulged at the time.

Peters must have known all along who he would go with, but
it suited him to allow both parties to think they were competing on a level
playing field.

It was especially to his advantage to play Labour along.
Left-wing commentator Chris Trotter reckons the party fell into line with
Peters’ agenda because it never expected to be in government.

It’s also now clear what some of Peters’ demands were. Apart
from four cabinet seats – which is more than twice what New Zealand First would
have been entitled to if appointments were proportionate with its poll result –
he also insisted on a waka-jumping bill to ensure no MPs went rogue on him.

You could call this his utu bill. Peters has a long memory
and is clearly still smarting over the eight MPs who deserted him in 1997.

The bill smacks of vindictiveness and runs counter to
democratic principles because it shifts control over MPs from voters (where it
rightly belongs) to party bosses, but Labour and even the supposedly principled
Greens were happy to humour him.

How long can a government formed in such shonky circumstances last? Good question. But there can be no doubt who the real winner was in 2017.

Footnote: Sharp-eyed readers will have detected an error in this column where I referred to New Zealand First losing three electorate seats. Of course only Peters held an electorate seat; the others were list seats. Ironically, my original version of the column was correct. But in the process of hastily correcting a relatively minor error in that particular sentence, I inadvertently created a greater one. There was a time when such a mistake would very likely have been picked up by a beady-eyed subeditor, but those days are gone.

Friday, January 12, 2018

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, January 10.)

There’s no point in mincing
words about this. I have skinny legs.

There, I’ve said it.

At boarding school my
nickname was Twiggy, after the waif-like English model whose emaciated face and
body were the symbol of fashionable Swinging London.

My older brother cruelly
joked that I risked being arrested under the vagrancy laws because I had no
visible means of support. “Boom boom!”, as Basil Brush would have said.

I was the 90 lb weakling who
got sand kicked in his face at the beach, as in the old Charles Atlas
body-building ads. The girl I fancied at an earlier secondary school shunned me
for a brawny member of the First XV. Who wouldn’t develop an inferiority
complex in such tragic circumstances?

I could sympathise with the
character in Spike Milligan’s comic novel Puckoon,
who objected to the legs the author had given him.

“Did you write these legs?”
the feckless Dan Milligan demanded to know. When the author admitted he had,
Milligan grumbled: “Well, I don’t like dem. I don’t like ’em at all at all. I
could ha’ writted better legs meself.”

All my life I have been
self-conscious about my legs. Growing up tall and skinny in a culture where the
ideal male body type has a low centre of gravity, a barrel-like torso and legs
the thickness of jetty piles – in other words, the build of a rugby prop – I
felt out of place.

I was often reluctant to wear
shorts, although I observed that overweight people felt no constraints about
exposing their surplus flesh. Some even seemed proud of it.

Somehow that was OK. Being
beefy was culturally acceptable in a way that skinniness was not.

My mother, a practical woman,
did her best to console me by pointing out that my legs reached all the way to
the ground, which was all that mattered.

Later, after I got married,
my wife often told me I had legs that would be considered highly desirable on a
woman. Strangely enough, this was no comfort. What self-respecting heterosexual
Kiwi bloke wants to be fancied by other men because he has shapely legs?

My physique posed practical
problems for me too, and still does. The jeans and trousers stocked in New
Zealand menswear stores are made for men built like … well, like rugby props.
The waists are too low and the legs too short.

I wait until I’m travelling
overseas. Then I go crazy, bingeing on jeans and trousers that actually fit me.
I’ve found Germany good for this – there are lots of tall men there – and
America even better.

Today, my wardrobe has
several surplus pairs of jeans from the US. Set loose in American clothing stores
with an infinite range of sizes, I’m like one of those grizzly bears you see on
TV wildlife documentaries when the salmon are running upstream. I barely know
which one to grab first. I gorge myself.

But here’s the thing. At my
advanced stage of life (I’m 67), I’ve decided I no longer care what people
think if I walk down the street in shorts. Who the hell do I need to impress?

Besides, after growing up
feeling a bit inadequate because I didn’t have the right physique for most
sports, I discovered a physical activity at which I was at least competent. I
started riding a bike, and discovered my legs weren’t totally useless after
all.

These skinny shanks have
propelled me around Lake Taupo several times in the 160 km Lake Taupo Cycle
Challenge. They have tackled some formidable mountain bike rides: the Karapoti
Classic, the Rainbow Rage, the Haurangi Crossing, the Heaphy Track and the St
James Cycle Trail, to name a few.

They once even stepped up on a podium when I finished second in my age group in a mountain bike race. I
began to feel a defiant pride about my spindly limbs.

But while my legs are no
longer the source of self-consciousness that they once were, I’d like to make a
statement on behalf of skinny-legged men everywhere.

I’ve noticed many times that
people don’t hesitate to comment on my legs – not necessarily in an insulting
way, but bluntly making the point that they’re, er, rather deficient in the
flesh department. Only a few days ago, my brother-in-law remarked on how skinny
they were.

He’s a good-hearted, generous
man, my bro’-in-law, but he’s Polish, and he tends to say what he thinks. It
doesn’t occur to many Poles that just because you think something, you don’t necessarily
have to say it.

I invited him to consider
why, in our culture, it’s considered okay to comment about a person being thin
when it would be deemed offensive to draw attention to the fact that someone is
overweight. I think he got my point.

Incidentally, he turned up
the following day wearing shorts himself. I was tempted to comment on the ghostly
whiteness of his limbs, but held my tongue.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.